Hair-hunting computer benefits from deep learning

A pair of University of Toronto researchers have been giving their computer a crash course in human hair. Computers are pretty good at recognizing faces, but less so at what surrounds them. That’s where Parham​ Arabi and Wenzhangzhi Guo come in. With the help of machine learning — and a little human input — the two researchers have been teaching computer vision algorithms to more accurately identify hair. Eventually, Arabi hopes the technique can be applied to more important applications, like the visual detection of skin cancer, or even the development of safer self-driving cars. “If you could take [dermatologists’] expertise, and then train a deep neural net to then realize some features or details that even doctors won’t be aware of, that would be just amazing,” Arabi said. But hair — something…